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William Michael Harnett, The Artist’s Letter Rack, 1879.

Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 63.5 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, Morris K. Jessup Fund.

In 1886, United States Treasury agents accompanied by New York City police bustled into one of the saloons owned by Theodore Stewart and demanded a painting be removed by order of the Federal Court. The painting was titled Still-life – Five Dollar Bill and the officers peered closely at it shaking their heads. They declared the confiscated work to be a counterfeit and removed it from the premises. Shortly thereafter, Federal Secret Service agents rapped on the door of the artist, a wan, thin, moustachioed man named William Michael Harnett and informed him he was under arrest for counterfeiting U. S. currency. The agents also confiscated other money paintings in the cluttered cell of a studio. Eventually, Harnett faced a federal judge, who, after examining the paintings closely through his pince-nez, told the artist: “The development and exercise of a talent so capable of mischief should not be encouraged.”

The young man was released with a warning and the paintings were returned.[22] Harnett never painted money again and died four years later, almost universally recognised as America’s finest still-life painter.

This painting that created such a turmoil was a prime example of the excruciating detail Harnett created when rendering ordinary objects to a degree of accuracy that people felt the need to reach out and touch the painting’s surface. Some viewers of Still-life – Five Dollar Bill tried to peel the bill off the wood tabletop with their fingernails until it was hung out of reach. The lines of the engraving tools are shown as are the slightly rolled edges of the tears caused by wear. As the wrinkles in the paper’s surface rise and fall, so does the image giving the illusion that there is actually space between the bill and the grainy wood surface. The signatures, the tiny writing and age-worn seals; everything is there giving a power to that crumpled slip of paper money it never had in reality.

By 1886, William Harnett had built up a considerable reputation as a trompe-l’œil, or ‘fool the eye’, painter. Sadly, his active career as an artist lasted only sixteen years from 1876 to 1892. In that time, he managed to produce about five hundred paintings, many of which have been lost; an even greater number have been forged and some achieved major recognition in collections around the world. Over that period of sixteen years he was either ignored, or excoriated by the art critics and taste-makers. He won no medals and received no prize awards from prestigious New York or Philadelphia academies. Only after his untimely death at the age of forty-four were his paintings held up as examples of excellence – and then only for a short time – until Impressionists from Europe waded ashore and he slipped from the scene for almost fifty years of obscurity.

Harnett was actually upholding a tradition in the United States begun in the eighteenth century with miniature painters and ‘Illusionists’ by the likes of Raphaelle Peale, his brother Rembrandt and his father Charles Wilson Peale. They called their work ‘deceptions’. One of their most famous collaborations is titled Catalogue for the Use of the Room, a Deception (1817). This painting by Charles Wilson Peale shows full-length portraits of Raphaelle and Titan Ramsey Peale mounting a flight of stairs framed by a real doorway and step.

The Peales in their time were cast in the same mould as ‘mechanics’ who slavishly copied nature without bringing a moral uplift or dramatic statement to the subject. These ‘Illusionists’ with their ‘deceptions’ fell into the pit of ‘marginalisation.’ Still-life painting was considered the lowest rank in the classifications established by the academies back in the eighteenth century. In his essay, “Sordid Mechanics” and “Monkey Talents” – The Illusionistic Tradition, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr writes:

“Marginality was arguably the most essential and distinctive condition of the production of trompe-l’œil painting… what illusionistic painters had most in common was not only their language of style, but their marginal artistic existence: the loneliness, alienation, and poverty that were the social, artistic and economic costs of the undertaking of illusionistic still-life painting. The recurrence of those conditions from Raphaelle Peale to Harnett was, perhaps, the truest tradition of illusionism.”[23]

Raphaelle Peale started out as a portrait artist, but achieved little patronage in Philadelphia. He tried cutting profiles with a patented ‘physiognotrace’ machine, but his reduction in circumstances sent him into alcoholism, delirium tremens and crippling gout that put him on crutches. He eventually turned to still-lifes, which at that time were considered fodder fit only for amateurs. Regardless, his work was displayed at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts from 1814 to 1818. Peale’s bad habits plus arsenic and mercury poisoning from helping out with taxidermy exhibits in his father’s museum added to a night of heavy drinking, finally killed him on 25 March 1825.

The same prejudice against still-life painting in general and the rigours of illusionism in particular dogged William Harnett as well as causing myopia from that close work under flickering gaslight. He was crippled from rheumatism while working over the cramped details in an often chilly room when he could not afford to heat it. His clothes were clean but ‘antique’ in cut.

Yet, he produced this incredible bounty of work and scholars have filled books with psychological interpretations and picked over into fragments what little documentation of his life exists. His genius is apparent once cut free from the Victorian imposition of romantic values and motivations. Buried in those myriad of details and textures lies his own poetry. For eighteen years, it rang in his ears only.

William Michael Harnett was born on 10 August 1848 in Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland to William Harnett, a shoemaker, and Honora (known as “Hannah”) Holland, a seamstress, He had an older brother, Patrick, who also became a shoemaker, and two younger sisters, Anne and Ella, who followed their mother into the seamstress trade. So it was in Victorian Ireland that the older brother followed father into the business and the younger brother got the education. The daughters worked for their dowries so they would have some value when married off; but that was in the Old Country. In 1849, the Harnetts packed up and emigrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

A natural talent for drawing must have been revealed in his formative years because in 1866 he entered the antique class at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. There, he laboured over drawing from casts, graduating from sketching bits of the human body up to the full body casts that were required before entering the still-life classes. In 1864 his father had drowned in the Delaware River and Harnett had to work and support his mother and siblings while going to school. Demonstrating his drawing skills, he was able to apprentice himself to the engraving trade, a practical application of his skills. As an apprentice, he began with wood, graduated to copper and steel, and was finally promoted to engraving silver flatware. At the age of twenty he moved to New York in 1869 and worked for the firms Tiffany & Company and Wood & Hughes scribing monograms. It was at the latter firm where he met his lifelong friend William Ignatius Blemly. During their acquaintance, Harnett presented a number of engraved gifts to Blemly that have survived to reveal his gift for skilfully incorporating the decorative motifs of the time with his burin onto everyday objects such as matchboxes and napkin rings.

Engraving is a nervous, highly controlled art form. A slip with the steel tool on the mirror surface of sterling silver cannot be erased or painted over. Success demands an artisan-craftsman frame of mind to initiate the cut, vary the depth and conclude the line in a single modulated stroke. It is also a tedious art form if the design must be repetitiously applied, as it was with silver eating utensils. Another factor was the design, which might have come from a supplied template rather than his own imagination. To extend his creativity, Harnett began studying painting at New York’s Cooper Union Institute and the New York Academy of Design at night. After a day at his engraver’s bench, the painting classes must have seemed relaxing.

William Michael Harnett, Job Lot Cheap, 1878.

Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 91.4 cm.

Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

William Michael Harnett, After the Hunt, 1885.

Oil on canvas, 181.6 × 123.2 cm.

Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, Mildred Anna Williams Collection.

William Michael Harnett, After the Hunt, 1883.

Oil on canvas, 133.3 × 91.4 cm.

Colombus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, bequest of Francis C. Sessions.

William Michael Harnett, For Sunday’s Dinner, 1888.

Oil on canvas, 94.3 × 53.6 cm.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

The class structure at the National Academy allowed Harnett to progress rapidly straight to sketching advanced sculptures. His chalk and charcoal drawing, Borghese Warrior, demonstrates a gift for observation and an appreciation of the mechanics of anatomy. His use of light shows modulation from upper left to lower right as the single high light source diminishes across the diagonal composition.

Another motivation to shift over to paint and brush was the advance of technology in the engraving trade. Electroplating, invented in the 1840s, allowed an industrial approach to what had been a hand-executed artisan craft. The assembly line was replacing the artist’s bench. In 1874 Harnett painted his first oil painting – which he was able to sell – of a still-life with a paint tube and grapes.

The painting is hardly a world beater, but it tapped into a market that had greater promise than the diminishing demand for his engraving skills. The painting also marked an advance beyond the studies offered at the National Academy. It was the practice at that time to offer painting to only the most advanced students. Part-timers like Harnett had to find painting lessons in the atelier of a full time professional artist. He wrote of his frustrations with this arrangement:

“I ventured to take a course of lessons from Thomas Jensen, who was at that time a famous painter of portraits. I paid him in advance and intended to finish the course, but I couldn’t do it. He didn’t exactly say I would never learn to paint, but he didn’t offer me any encouragement. After I had studied with him for ten days, I asked him how a certain fault of mine could be corrected. I shall never forget his answer.

“‘Young man,’ he said, ‘the whole secret of painting is putting the right colour in the right place.’

“The next day I went back to my old way of study.”[24]

William Michael Harnett, Trophy of the Hunt, 1885.

Oil on canvas, 107.8 × 55.4 cm.

The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Harnett packed up and moved back to Philadelphia in 1876, rejoining his mother and sisters and enrolling once again in the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. By this time, one would imagine he could write his own ticket at the Academy. He was a professional artist, exhibiting and selling his paintings. However, he exhibited and sold mostly in public places: building lobbies, saloons, restaurants and billiard rooms. The critics wrote him off as having little talent other than patience. Trompe-l’œil art had the same reputation as humorous paintings with animals such as Dogs Playing Poker – non-aesthetic placebos for the masses.

Although he enrolled in life drawing classes at the Academy, Harnett continued to pursue still-lifes as his bread and butter work, seeking out varieties of textures and surfaces that appeared to be totally random. Of his working methods, very little documentation was left behind. Only an observation by his friend Edward Taylor Snow has survived stating Harnett would “make a finished lead pencil drawing with minute details prior to executing a painting”.[25]

Until infrared reflectography began revealing carbon under painting details, little was known about the sequence of events with that drawing. Today, we can see the pencil lines directly on the canvas, and other mysteries have come to light. For one thing, the pencil drawing was not the necessarily the final disposition. In Still-Life with Violin and Music, for example, the violin’s scroll has been significantly thinned. In other works, whole background elements have been painted over to simplify the compositions. He sometimes altered the subjects, removed handles from jars, tassels from pipes and shifted bits of paper or creased their corners as he painted.

While he used the pencil guides in his earlier paintings, the more he worked, the more often he applied his placement of objects directly on the background colour. Harnett used a pointed tool or the end of his brush to scribe a line in directly into the background and then painted into it. As he worked, he fattened jugs and shortened canes to maintain correct spatial relationships and scale to honour the composition. He continued to use some form of background drawing for object placement and painted his subject matter elements in front of each other, as they existed in reality.

William Michael Harnett, Cigar Box, Pitcher, and “The New York Herald”, 1880.

Oil on canvas, 20.1 × 19.7 cm.

Courtesy of Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, New York.

In his paintings of the late 1870s produced in Philadelphia, The Banker’s Table, painted in 1877, shifts Harnett’s subject matter from trivial collections of fruit, dishes, flowers, vegetables and other frivolous objects to hard currency and realities of commerce. His time in New York might have introduced him to these symbols of finance as the new icons of American progress. The country had shifted into the Industrial Revolution of factories and finance, mass production and rapid communications following the Civil War. Ledger books, an antique quill pen and a wad of bank notes held down with a coin wrapper of silver dollars sit next to what appears to be a gold Double Eagle. However, the activities, both social and industrial, of the Gilded Age were built on a foundation of unease, a corrupted morality that Harnett seems to grasp. Ashes spill from overturned pipes, crumbs litter table tops, age and patina darken well-handled instruments, brass is left unpolished and reveals the subtle dents of hard use. Nothing seems new.

He became involved with gathering both the symbols of national commerce and personal items as well: letter racks, business cards, addressed envelopes, newspapers, elements of after-work relaxation showing pipes, tobacco cans, musical instruments and recreation. His Cigar Box, Pitcher and “New York Herald” reproduces a variety of textures in a strictly male context that seem to have followed an event. There is a story-telling quality to the collection of objects. The pitcher anchors the right side while the wood cigar box of cheap Colorado Gold cigars is the Cigar Box, Pitcher and "The New York Herald" centrepiece. It is the details that tell the story. A Dutch porcelain pipe sans shank has a cigar butt stuffed into its bowl – a method pipe smokers use to enjoy a hot short cigar or cigarillo – with the burnt matches dropped casually on the table cloth. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the upside-down New York Herald banner of the half-folded newspaper beneath the jug, and a mug of tea, claret or other drink sits behind the cigars. Two biscuits with crumbs complete the scene as if waiting for the smoker to return and finish his snack and clean up the mess.

In 1880 Harnett sailed for Europe, the birthplace of trompe-l’œil painting. The style dated back to 400 B. C. and can be found in the murals recovered from the ruins of volcano-devastated Pompeii. A famous story from the historian Vasari tells of two competing trompe-l’œil artists who arranged a contest to see who could paint the most realistic scene. One artist painted a bowl of fruit with such faithful detail that birds fluttered down to peck at the grapes. Certain he had won, he turned to his rival and crowed loudly, “Draw back the curtains and reveal your painting!” The rival then knew he had won because the curtains were his painting. Another tale of the time told of Rembrandt’s pupils in his studio taking time to paint coins on the floor and then laugh uproariously when the master bent down to pick them up.

Murals painted in the Baroque and Renaissance by Andrea Mantegna, Paolo Uccello and Paolo Veronese utilised trompe-l’œil techniques in churches and palaces to open what architect Leone Alberti referred to as “windows into space”.

Harnett had earned enough with his painting sales in Philadelphia to support himself in Europe where he studied and exhibited his new works in London, and the Paris Salon, finally spending four years in Germany. His arrival in Munich at that time was fortunate as the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch art with its still-life tradition was just making itself felt in Munich in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. His still life paintings had received their typical good reactions among the people of London and Paris, but as usual the critics ho-hummed his style as boring. Painting was undergoing a loosening of styles, a freer use of brushes and palette knives, an explosion of colour and lighter schemes as the Impressionists began to make their presence felt. But in Munich, in the academy and the galleries, still-life pictures of cluttered interiors and aftermaths of hunting were all the rage on the burghers’ walls. Guns of all vintages leaned against drapery or rough wood panelling as game hung head down from lashings and pipes sprouted from tobacco canisters. Baskets, ceramics, brass and hammered tin flasks, pots, covered beer mugs and butchers’ cleavers lay strewn about. Harnett plunged into this œuvre adding Prussian bloody-mindedness to his compositions.

Considered his masterpiece series, after studying in Munich for three years, he began these paintings titled After the Hunt – a common German theme – substituting various objects within the same concept. Dead game hangs in front of an old door surrounded by guns, hats, game sacks, pipes on tethers, dented hunting horns, old-fashioned powder horns, knives and swords. These are large paintings, much larger than his previous works, but displaying the same level of excruciating detail and attention to lighting, texture and spatial relationships.

He also created a series of ‘dining room’ pictures that featured single dead animals: ducks, geese, or rabbits hanging in front of a plain background.

While the German artists preferred more austere scenes of plucked game, and very realistic dead creatures often with wounds showing, Harnett’s Merganser, painted in 1883, portrays an almost balletic duck arrested in a dignified swoon. Nary is a feather ruffled. The layers of feathers beneath the wing are sculpted and its breast is plump and undamaged. One leg is trussed up by a tether to a nail in the wall, but the other hangs languidly apart from the body in a gesture from Swan Lake.

Harnett produced four versions of After the Hunt and was sure this virtuoso demonstration of his skills would create his reputation in the fine art world instead of decorating saloons and billiard halls. He was wrong. Critics still harrumphed and turned away from yet another dead animal picture with no “soul”. In 1886 he returned to New York, set up a studio and continued to paint what and how he knew best.

One of the most recognised paintings from this period is The Faithful Colt, finished in 1890. The subject is an old 186 °Colt Army Model percussion revolver hanging from a nail through its trigger guard. Its treatment resembles the “dining room” pictures of dear game. The old pistol is nickel plated with worn ivory grips and shows wear from firing where gunpowder has pitted the plating where the cylinder meets the barrel’s breech. A general patina has flattened the shine and cracks appear in the grips where they meet the butt strap. An officer or cavalryman in the Civil War might have used this weapon, but at the time of the painting, guns that used loose powder, ball and percussion caps had been made obsolete by cartridges.

This work is one of only ten paintings completed in Harnett’s last four years of life. It was exhibited – like so many of his works – not in a gallery, but in the store window of Black, Starr & Frost, a New York jewellery store. Originally titled The Old-Fashioned Colt, this painting carried a literary title like his other works, After the Hunt, For Sunday’s Dinner, The Old Cupboard and The Old Violin to reduce the “illusionist” stigma that drew yawns from critics as being little more than mechanically slavish copies of nature. In one of his few pronouncements about his work, Harnett further attempted to distance himself from the “deception” artists: “In painting from still life, I do not closely imitate nature. Many points I leave out and many I add. Some models are only suggestions.”[26]

William Michael Harnett, The Old Cupboard Door, 1889.

Oil on canvas, 156.5 × 104.1 cm.

City Art Galleries, Sheffield, England.

William Michael Harnett, Still-Life – Violin and Music (Music and Good Luck), 1888.

Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 76.2 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, Wolfe Fund, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection.

William Michael Harnett, The Old Violin, 1886.

Oil on canvas, 96.5 × 60 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., gift of Mr and Mrs Richard Mellon Scaife in honour of Paul Mellon.

William Michael Harnett, The Faithful Colt, 1890.

Oil on canvas, 57.1 × 47 cm.

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.

In 1886, Harnett developed rheumatoid arthritis and had to be hospitalised to bring down the inflammation. At the age of forty his health declined further when he came down with kidney disease and admitted himself to Saint Francis Hospital in Manhattan. By 1889 his sickness had intensified into acute diffuse glomerulonephritis or inflamed kidneys that can lead to kidney failure. This failure, or uraemia, shuts down the kidney’s ability to clean toxic material from the circulatory system causing nausea, vomiting, anaemia, hypertension, mental dysfunction and strokes.

In that same year his mother, Honora, died. Her pride in his accomplishments as a painter had never wavered and her death left him depressed. Since his father’s death in 1864, Harnett had contributed to the support of his mother and sisters, which, though his paintings had sold well, left him very little spare cash. That summer, he journeyed to spas in Carlsbad and Wiesbaden in Germany to “take the waters” and relieve his crippling rheumatism. The application of hot springs provided some relief, but after returning to New York, his health slipped further downhill. After another hospital stay, he travelled to Hot Springs, Arkansas. That year, he completed only one painting, The Old Cupboard Door.

This small painting includes a potpourri of his favourite subjects – but the choices are steeped in melancholy – from the torn binding of the book dangling by a thread (the frailty of life) to the small Roman figurine of Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry. A violin bow diagonally brings the composition back to centre where it pauses at the circular stained tambourine and then continues along the angled pages pinned to the wood next to the violin. Above Harnett’s dying rose is sheet music for La Dernière Rose d’été, a popular tune of the period where Thomas Moore sees his life in comparison with the last rose of the season. Accepting the metaphoric road signs to mortality, it is at this point when the viewer takes in the overall view and becomes aware that William Harnett’s 1889 painting is virtually a Cubist abstraction. The sophistication of his elements, “… Many points I leave out and many I add…” amounts to a road map for future Cubists, Picasso, Braque, Rivera, Lipchitz and others who might well have seen his work in Europe. Picasso’s Still-Life with Violin and Fruit is a particularly startling comparison.

Following his return from Arkansas, Harnett suffered a stroke on the pavement outside his Manhattan studio and collapsed into a coma. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he died on 29 October 1892. The doctor’s post-mortem examination revealed that Harnett was undernourished and anaemic. His estate amounted to $500 and a few paintings.

As is the case with so many artists underappreciated in their lifetime, his death brought about a re-evaluation of his work and he became – for a brief time – eulogised as one of America’s finest still-life painters. However, the Impressionists and anything French was beginning to devour Manhattan wall space in galleries and museums. Harnett’s quaint still-lifes slipped from favour as relics of the past and for forty years – until 1939 – remained curiosities bundled together with other illusionists and forgeries still relegated to saloons and billiard parlours in small towns.

In 1939 William Michael Harnett’s work was rediscovered and championed by Downtown Gallery owner Edith Halpert in her Greenwich Village establishment. Her interest had been piqued when she saw The Faithful Colt and brokered the sale of the painting to the Atheneum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. Colt Firearms Manufacturing Company had their headquarters in that city and donated a wing to the Atheneum. Harnett’s painting was a welcome addition to the museum’s collection. Intrigued by Harnett’s work, Halpert began to acquire his paintings and in April 1939 staged a highly successful exhibition which attracted a cross-section of influential museums and collectors, adding their imprimatur to the resurrection of Harnett’s reputation. Over the years, he has risen to the top tier of American Realist Painters.[27]